Banking on the future | Q&A with Banks Homes
As the company celebrates its 50th year, Place North East met with Russ Hall, managing director at the family-run North East business, to discuss its expansion into the Yorkshire market, plans to quadruple annual output, and its ambition to build a more sustainable model for housebuilding.
Can you give a brief overview of the company’s history and what led to Banks branching into housing in 2023?
Banks Homes is part of the Banks Group, a family-run business that is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and which has a long and successful history of diversification into new markets.
The Banks Group has worked in the residential property development sector since the 1980s, selling land to major housebuilders. Alongside the sale of its renewable energy division, it was a logical step for it to use some of the revenues generated by that disposal to start building new, high-quality, and sustainable homes for itself.
I joined the business to help set it up ahead of its official launch in 2023 and to bring my experience of running regional scale housebuilding operations. We started work on the first Banks Homes site, Symeon Court in Durham City, within a few weeks of the company’s launch, with our first large-scale development, the 150-home Cathedral Meadows in West Rainton, following in early 2024.
Since then, we have started work on sites in Yarm, Wynyard, and Hambleton in North Yorkshire, and have recently exchanged contracts with Homes England for the next phase of a major gateway development in Morpeth, Northumberland, where work will start by the end of the year.
You’re aiming to grow from just over 100 completions this year to around 400 annually by 2031. What are the key milestones that need to be achieved to make that happen? What gives you confidence those targets are realistic?
The primary reason for our confidence that we will reach these targets is the extremely positive feedback that we have had from our customers so far, in respect of both the Banks Homes customer journey and the excellent quality of our finished homes.
With development now well under way at several sites, our first goal is to double our annual output to 200 homes per year by the end of 2027. It’s an ambitious initial target, but we believe we have the pipeline, resources, and focus required to reach it.
We currently have seven planning applications in the system for more than 600 homes across the North East and Yorkshire, with further applications to be submitted shortly, and are building the core Banks Homes team to ensure we have the resources we need to manage an increasing workload.
Further recruitment is expected as the business grows, with Banks Homes recently commencing its apprentice programme to complement the longstanding Banks Group graduate programme. We also have a high-quality roster of sub-contractors in place to support us as new projects come forward.
How much of your five-year growth strategy depends on those seven schemes being approved, and how much confidence do you have in the current planning environment?
Over the last decade, Banks Property has maintained a 100% planning success rate, which gives us great confidence in the quality of the projects we put forward and their chances of securing planning approval.
The planning applications that we currently have in the system are naturally very important to our growth strategy, but we have a number of others following on behind them which are at different stages of development and which will also be realised within the coming five years.
Rapid expansion usually requires significant investment. How is Banks Homes funding this growth?
The resources that the Banks Group has put into the foundation and development of Banks Homes means we have direct access to the capital we need to deliver on our business plan.
You’ve spoken about sustainability being a key differentiator. As building regulations continue to tighten and Future Homes Standard requirements approach, what investments are you making now, and how do those affect build costs and sales values?
One of the central tenets of Banks Homes’ design philosophy is that our properties are ‘designed for tomorrow’ and fully future-proofed through the sustainable technologies that we include in them as standard, rather than as optional extras.
Our homes are some of the most sustainable and energy-efficient available on the market, and we’re also continually evolving our designs to make sure each home meets customers’ needs for years to come.
At our Cornfields development in Yarm, for example, every one of our homes is being fitted with smart heating systems, air source heat pumps, and electric vehicle car charging points, while the four and five-bedroom homes come with ground floor underfloor heating as standard.
We don’t view the investments we’re making in sustainable technologies as extra costs. They are setting the standard for how homes should be designed and are part of how we are delivering a higher internal and external specification than other volume builders in the mid-prime markets.
This approach has landed extremely well in the market place, and we will continue to investigate and invest in evolving sustainable technologies as they come onto the market.
Are there particular locations across the North East and Yorkshire where you’re actively looking to acquire more land?
We pride ourselves on our developments being ‘placed for perfection’ and are investigating options right across the North East, as well as North and West Yorkshire to ensure we can find exactly the right locations for our future developments.
Looking five years ahead, do you see Banks Homes eventually expanding into new geographies?
Our focus is solely on the North East and Yorkshire for the foreseeable future, but there’s no reason why the Banks Homes model can’t be successfully replicated in other parts of the country as and when suitable opportunities arise.
